Daily Blog Posts

1/20 – Skapa and The University

Today was our first day of getting down to business on this trip. Up first, we visited Skapa, a small marketing firm located in Gothenburg. We met with the CEO of the company, Erik Ekholm. I thoroughly enjoyed the Skapa visit, in large part because I am a marketing major. Learning how an international marketing company executes its content and how they drive business for their clients. Erik was an excellent presenter, and was very friendly and funny. The company as a whole has only 9 people, but uses that to their advantage. Their company specializes in providing very personal care to their clients in order to develop loyalty and have a high customer retention rate. We talked a lot about how social media is developing a larger and larger presence in the marketing world. He also spoke a lot about the importance of Search Engine Optimization and how involved they are with google. Google is one of their main platforms to drive their content marketing, which was really cool to hear about because not many companies talk about using google in their marketing. After the presentation, we spoke with a content creator named Magnus, who was extremely friendly and took a lot of time out of his day to talk to us about his work as well as just life in Sweden in general. Overall, Skapa was a very enjoyable company visit, and I hope the rest are just as interesting.

After Skapa, we headed down to Goteborg University to learn so more about the history of Sweden and Gothenburg, as well as learning about the hockey associated within the area. The presentation was given by one current and one retired professor. Following the presentation, we got to meet with multiple Swedish college students to mingle and talk about our different countries. I think everyone had a lot of fun during this part of the day, and the Swedes were very funny. We all had a blast talking with one student named Eric. He was hilarious, and got a huge laugh out of everyone when he said he thought I was Justiin Timberlake! That’s the first time I’ve ever gotten that comparison, but I’ll take it as a big compliment! The class has had a lot of fun now calling me JT and Justin, and I think its awesome! Do I look like Justin Timberlake? You be the judge. Side by side comparison soon to come. Stay tuned!

3 Big Takeaways

The Swedes love their hockey, and are very proud of their local team, the Frölunda Indians.
Marketing is very content oriented here, with focus on educational articles providing benefits to customers rather than focusing on the product itself.
The CEO of Skapa gave us the advice to really strive to find a company where we can develop professionally, and not to stay in one place too long if you are not constantly improving and further developing.